Potter-madness Approaching Full Froth

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It’s not just July, it’s the “Harry Potter month” to end all Harry Potter months. With book 7 coming out on the 21st, the frenzy will be ramping up over the next couple of weeks.

Amazon has been doing its best to stoke the flames (recall the Harry-est Town in America promotion). A new press release from the online bookseller is breathless even by the form’s loose standards. “Harry Potter Mania Reaches All-Time High on Amazon.com” it proclaims, and I imagine millions of foaming clickers rampaging through Amazon’s digital halls and tearing the place to pieces. Alas, by “mania” Amazon means pre-orders, which at last count are approaching 1.6 million, eclipsing the record total set by book 6. Amazon continues to incite the madness, however, with its new offer of a $5 “promotional certificate to spend in August” for customers who pre-order the new book. Go crazy, Harry Potter fans.

I'm pleased to announce that Mark Batty Publisher, a New York-based art & design press, will be publishing my first book this spring. Modeled on fin-de-siecle scientific manuals, A Field Guide to the North American Family: An Illustrated Novella presents the story of two families in 63 alphabetized entries: Adolescence, Boredom, Commitment... A lavish, full-color plate will illustrate each entry.The book itself, in the tradition of Julio Cortazar'sHopscotch and of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, encourages collaborative reading via a system of cross-references. But in discussing the illustrations, MBP and I decided we didn't want the collaboration to end there. So this week, we're launching www.afieldguide.com, an online resource that allows interested artists to contribute digital images to the Field Guide. My dream has always been to have 40-60 photographers represented in the book, each offering their own distinct take on contemporary life.Every image submitted via the "upload" page will be posted on the website, indexed and cross-referenced by the Field Guide's entry tags. They will remain there in perpetuity, along with contributors' bios and website links - a kind of networked reference work. In March, we'll select 63 images from contributors who've asked to be considered for the print edition, and those will become the images in the book. Each contributor will have a bio in the back of the book, and will receive a contributors' copy.Writers who publish in literary magazines have long been used to the online submission process, but illustrating a book via internet collaboration is, I think, a relatively new thing. I'm excited to see how it works. If afieldguide.com succeeds, it seems to me, it might open some publishing doors for the explosion of online photographic activity: flickr, photoblogging, etc. And the book promises to be beautifully designed.The photographic element of the book will only be as strong as the submissions we receive. So I want to take this opportunity to encourage readers of The Millions to explore afieldguide.com, to contribute an image or two, and to spread the word, via email and blog, to artists who might be interested in participating. Cheers.

As the baseball season gets underway, it looks like this summer's big off-the-field story will be steroid use. (More serious allegations are beginning to surface as the San Francisco Chronicle reports that federal investigators were told Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, and Gary Sheffield all received performance enhancing drugs from a lab that is currently under investigation.) But last year's story, the fallout from Michael Lewis' book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, still has legs. The March 1st issue of Sports Illustrated (on newsstands last week) contains a vociferous epilogue to Moneyball in which Lewis catalogs some of the more outrageous responses that his book received from baseball insiders. He takes to task particularly egregious offenders, like Joe Morgan, for continuing to dismiss the book out of hand. It's a must read for anyone who was swept up in last summer's Moneyball furor.

The revelation of the so-called "Book of Judas" last week made for some good news stories. The newly discovered gospel claims that one of history's oldest bad guys wasn't so bad. It's a provocative story and there's an element of Indiana Jones to it all, as the lost text was found in Egypt and made its way to the public through years of intrigue and backchannel trading. Scholars, meanwhile, are already debating how relevant the document is. The New York Times article on the gospel gets into the scholarly debate somewhat, but an illuminating essay by David Kopel at the Volokh Conspiracy explains why the "Gospel of Judas" is not a lost book from the Bible, but rather a Gnostic text. But what interests me most are not the theological ramifications of the find, but how its public unveiling is tied to the release of so many books (and a movie).First of all, it's unlikely that this news would be of such interest were it not for the success of The Da Vinci Code, which has made once obscure Gnostic texts mainstream reads for fans of Dan Brown's book. It's also worth noting that The Da Vinci Code movie comes out soon, on May 19th, which is sure to keep early Christian mysticism in the news. But then there are the books themselves. National Geographic, which officially made the documents public, has two related books out now: The Gospel of Judas, which is an annotated translation of the original documents, and The Lost Gospel, which is about the discovery of the gospel and the research that went into deciphering it. The David Kopel essay cited above mentions an AP story in which James M. Robinson, a rival to the National Geographic scholars, explains why the find is probably not all that important. It turns out Robinson has his own book on the gospel coming out, too, The Secrets of Judas, which gives his view on the find.So, for something that was portrayed in the media as a stunning new find, this all seems to be very stage managed to me. The Gospel of Judas itself has been floating around since the 70s, but the three books (and the National Geographic TV special) all seem timed to hitch onto The Da Vinci Code's next wave of publicity as Dan Brown emerges from his court proceedings and his best seller hits the big screen.

Richard Nash, the guy behind Brooklyn's Soft Skull Press has started a blog. Aside from writing about Soft Skull's books, Richard also plans to discuss matters of importance to small publishers. Look for his dispatches from the Frankfurt Book Fair coming soon.Another small publisher, Unbridled Books, presents its homepage in a blog-like format. Small publishers have to work hard to be heard among the media conglomerates that control most of the publishing industry. Using blogs give these little guys the opportunity to do something that their much bigger competitors have trouble doing, make individual connections with their readers.